Religion is in decline in the West, and America is no exception

The US is often taken to be a contrary case to the general decline of religion in the West. David Voasand Mark Chavesfind that religiosity is in fact decreasing in the US, and for the same reason that it has been falling elsewhere. They comment that Americans are not becoming less religious over their lives; rather, the more religious generations born in the early 20th century are dying off and being replaced by newer generations that are less likely to be religious.

The religiosity of the United States has impressed observers since the early 19th century, and American levels of religious involvement remain strikingly high compared to those in virtually all highly developed countries. The US is often taken to be a decisive counterexample to the idea that modernization tends to undermine religious belief and activity (what’s known as the ‘secularization thesis’).

It’s become clear, though, that American religiosity has been declining for decades. What’s more, this change has been produced by the generational patterns underlying religious decline elsewhere in the West: each successive birth cohort is less religious than the preceding one. Taken together, these two facts mean that trends in religiosity are remarkably similar across the western world.

Religious affiliation, church attendance, and belief in God have all fallen in the US. None of these declines is happening fast, but the signs are now unmistakable. To take religious belief as an example, only 45 percent of young adults aged 18-30 have no doubt about God’s existence, compared with 68 percent of people aged 65 and over. The overall level of belief is being eroded as people born early in the 20th century are replaced by members of subsequent generations with weaker religious convictions. Children are raised by parents who are less religious than their parents were, and the culture is reshaped with the passing of each generation.

These declines in traditional religiosity aren’t offset by increasing vitality elsewhere. It’s true that the “spiritual but not religious” phenomenon has expanded in recent years. This diffuse spirituality may provide a growing market for certain kinds of religious products, such as self-help books with spiritual themes, but it isn’t offsetting religious decline, re-energizing existing religious institutions, or providing a foundation for new forms of religious collective action.

It’s not just the fact of religious decline that makes the United States similar to Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, or most of Europe. It’s also the way that secularization has occurred mainly, and in some cases entirely, because each successive generation is slightly less religious than the one before.

Figure 1 shows a good example: religious affiliation in Great Britain has declined from one decade of birth to the next for years of birth going back to the beginning of the 20th century. There is remarkable stability over the adult life course for all generations. Individuals might become more or less religious, but within generations these gains and losses largely balance out. That means that decline isn’t a matter of people losing their religion in adult life; it’s about people being less religious than their parents and grandparents.

Figure 2 shows monthly attendance at religious services in the United States; the pattern is very similar to what we see in Figure 1. Gentle decline within birth cohorts during the 1970s was followed by rising participation in the 1980s, after which within-generation change is very minor. Churchgoing decline in the United States is driven by the same cohort replacement mechanism that drives religious change elsewhere in the West.

Figure 2 – Attendance monthly or more often by decade of birth, United States, 1973-2014

Source: General Social Survey, 1973-2014. Note: Includes respondents aged 20-84 born in the US. Graph shows three-survey moving average. To avoid overstating religious decline, the unusually religious 1972 GSS sample has been excluded.

Religious decline is America isn’t new: it seems to have begun with people born early in the 20th century. At least since then, strong religious affiliation, church attendance, and firm belief in God have all fallen from one birth cohort to the next. None of these declines is happening fast, and levels of religious involvement in the United States remain high by world standards. But the signs of both aggregate decline and generational differences are now unmistakable.

Most research that compares American religion with religion elsewhere emphasizes the high levels of participation in the United States, and treats those high levels as strong evidence that America is exceptional. If we look at the trends, though, it appears that the US isn’t a counterexample to the idea that modernization causes problems for religion. On the contrary, religious change in the United States is very similar to what we see elsewhere: long-term decline produced mainly by generational replacement. This process operates slowly, and it can be counteracted in the short term by short-lived revivals, but it is very difficult to reverse.

An obvious agenda for future research is to try to understand better the causal mechanisms that lie behind these cohort differences. What social and cultural changes make each generation slightly less religious than the previous one? What is the relative importance of changes in geographical mobility, family structure, education, technology, economic conditions, and other factors? We haven’t tried to identify all the causal forces at work, but we hope future research will make progress on this agenda.

We should ask, “Why did secularization take hold in the US when it did?” rather than “Why is secularization not occurring in the United States?” It may be that some of the explanatory factors invoked in answers to the traditional question – such as church-state separation or immigration history – help to explain why religious decline started later and is occurring more slowly in the US than in some other places. Nevertheless, over the long run, religious involvement is being undermined by the same forces that have operated in the rest of the industrial and post-industrial world.

The big question is whether or not modernity, sooner or later, brings secularization. Many scholars have been saying ‘no’, citing America’s apparently exceptional status. The question is still open, but since it is no longer clear that the US is on a qualitatively different religious trajectory, assertions that the secularization thesis does not apply outside of Europe, Canada, and Australia are unwarranted. It now seems that the classic question – does modernization undermine religion? – has been prematurely answered, “not in general.” That answer needs to be reconsidered.

David Voas – University College London
David Voas is Professor and Head of the Department of Social Science at UCL Institute of Education, University College London. His research focuses on religious change, and on beliefs, values and attitudes more generally, in developed societies. He is on the leadership group of the European Values Study and is co-director of British Religion in Numbers.

Mark Chaves – Duke UniversityMark Chaves is Professor of Sociology, Religious Studies, and Divinity at Duke University. He directs the National Congregations Study, a wide-ranging survey of a nationally representative sample of religious congregations conducted in 1998, 2006, and 2012. Much of his research focuses on the social organization of religion. His most recent book is American Religion: Contemporary Trends (Princeton University Press, 2011).

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15 Comments

Modernization and proper education brings secularization. I am a college educated American who was a fundamentalist Christian for 25 years, and today I am an atheist. In America, the the 1970’s and 1980’s were clearly dominated by Christian evangelical ideologies; however, with the advent of the internet in the late 1990’s, we have seen the proliferation of secular ideas permeate America. Easy access to information describing how all religions are simply man-made mythologies have been critical to the secularization of American. The ascent of the internet corresponds with the descend of religious belief in America. This fact should be self-evident. When I was a Christian in the 1980’s and 1990’s, it was easy for religious leaders to contravene secular teachings with religion teachings because these communities are very insular. Now, extraordinary truth claims made by religious teachers can easily be vetted, within minutes, via the internet. The internet is the key to the secularization puzzle.

Have to disagree with you here Steve. I’m currently a Ph.D. student at a very secular institution. Started off Christian, left for a bit, and then came back. The biggest reason for reconsidering Chrstianity, to me, was the internet’s power to expose the flaws in atheist arguments.

I’d point out the USA’s reduced welfare state compared to Europe. If the state won’t look after people, then the church will. If you’ve lived in small town America, you’ll notice the church is a focal point of social activities, looking after the unfortunate, and helping with medical bills.

[…] Religiosity is on the decline, at least in the West. This is a good thing, to an extent, but there is a problem. Consider Nietzsche’s infamous statement “God is dead.” This was not a celebratory statement. What Nietzsche meant was that the idea of God, and the institutions surround it such as the church, had ceased to have moral and ethical power. […]

[…] you down? Feel like giving up on it altogether? You are not by any stretch alone. Religiosity is in grave decline in Europe and the U.S., prompting panic in some quarters and satisfaction in others (that young adults, for example, agree […]

If Christianity is a religion, who high jacked it and made it a religion?—-Maybe guys like that “funnymentalist Christian who is now an atheist (Give us a break). Sounds like a boring lecture you would hear in a Comparative Religion course in university which, not surprisingly focuses on religious pluralism in the broad context of secularism–a kind of smorgasbord of pseudo-religious beliefs (whatever works for the individual) , without any due consideration of exclusive absolute truth , as for example, the truth claims of Jesus Christ (John 14:6). Right now, Christianity; that is genuine biblical Christianity, is growing rapidly in the face of persecution, not declining. Even many Muslims are being converted to Christ. Unless I missed something he said, I think “religion” has been in decline across the globe for a long time, especially the ritualistic, ceremonial, spiritually dead Orthodoxy (I.e. Roman Catholicism ) that denies the power of the Gospel to save from sin and give personal assurance of eternal life and a home in heaven here and now (Not after we die). We know we are living in times of apostasy and false teachers, but I believe young people especially in our secular, pluralistic, relativistic , politically correct society are fed up with “dead organized religion” that provides no answers to the ultimate questions of life: “Where do I come from? Why am I here? Where am I going when I die?, even suppresses the truth of God’s Word. That is why I believe the decline of “religion” in this sense is a good thing–a great opportunity for Christians to reach out to these young people with the certain hope and assurance of the Gospel of God’s grace to all who will truly come to Christ in repentance and faith. Young people today are hungry for the uncompromising truth of God’s Word . God bless

Religious pluralism does disservice to all religions. All religions are exclusive; that is, they have fundamental, exclusive truth claims. Hinduism has two non-negotiable truth claims–karma and reincarnation. In Buddhism, there is a denial of the essential notion of self (self, as we know it, does not exist). The three things you need to believe to be reconciled to God in Christianity–that Jesus is God, that He died on the cross, and that he rose from the dead–Islam asserts are completely wrong to believe, and believing in Jesus’ deity will even send a person to hell in Islam. Truth by definition is exclusive (2+2=4, not 13). Every proposition and and assertion in contradictory world views cannot be true. The law of non-contradiction does apply to reality:Two contradictory statements cannot both be true in the same sense. To deny the law of non-contradiction is to affirm it. In truth, all religions are not the same. All religions do not point to God (In Christianity, God seeks and finds us, not we Him). At the heart of every religion is an uncompromising commitment to a particular way of defining who God is or is not, and accordingly, of defining life’s purpose. Even naturalism which poses as irreligion, is exclusive. Naturalism teaches that anything supernatural is outside the realm of evidence, and purely an opinion, not a matter of fact. All Christians whom God has brought to faith in Christ through divine revelation (the convicting, drawing and regenerating power of the Holy Spirit) would strongly disagree. God bless..

If Christianity isnt a “religion” what is it. And “No it’s a relationship” is not an argument. If Christianity is true, it’s a “relationship” and no other religion is. If it’s false, it’s not a “relationship” and whatever religion is true is a “relationship” if it’s one of those se that claim so – and some other faiths do.

As someone who had been forced to believe in Roman Catholic doctrine, I myself personally believe that the decline is due to the fact that older generations are firmly set in their own beliefs, and the younger generation is more inclined to open-mindedness and exploration of beliefs. When human life is coming to an end, the general idea of the end-all finalization of your life is, quite frankly, terrifying. You know it’s there. You know it’s coming. But the mere thought that you’ll never be able to walk again, the fact that when you die, you’ll never be able to see, or hear, or appreciate nature’s beauty and various things in life that you have had the simple pleasure of enjoying, as the kiss of a loved one on your cheek, the closeness of friendship, and the happiness of simply being alive, no matter what hardships you’ve gone through, is a scary thought for anyone. Losing what you’ve known for your entire life is a hard task for anyone, and the fact that you’re going to lose what you have is like getting your hopes raised up and crashed down in the same day. It’s a terrible and frightening feeling, and I believe that when seniors experience this emotion, this… realization that the end is coming to their consciousness, they tend to go to doctrine that promises the hope that you won’t die, that your spiritual self will survive in ways your physical self shall not. This is a way of protecting yourself from the harsh truth that you will die, and in the future years, you will be forgotten, and that your life, while well lived and enjoyable while it lasts, is basically a waste of energy. Humans matter. Each and every person on this planet is important to the universe’s upholding and energy distribution, but in the simplest tense, humans come and go faster than the wind. You all have lives, you all have stories, but in time, those stories will be just that… stories. Unless otherwise documented, the story of your life will be short-lived (pardon the pun), and frankly, I don’t believe human kind is quite ready to accept the harsh truth that you will be forgotten, and that everything you have ever known will change and end, leaving you to wonder- am I worth it? Are you worth living? Are you just a waster of space, a waste of energy? No. You are not. You have a mission here, a purpose as to why you were given the life you have, a reason as to why you are not just one of three billion other humans out there. Religion acknowledges that but doesn’t appreciate it, which is why most people tend to draw away from it and figure things out for themselves. If religion is shoved down your throat, you will fight and bite and kick and hate that spoon shoveling doctrine down into your soul without your consent. If you take the time to figure things out yourself, your beliefs will be more firmly put into place in your soul compared to having been forced into submission, which can either go in two ways; rebellion, or acceptance. I personally have always been a rebel, so when I was told I would be in a Catholic school all my life, I fought it and tried to tell the system to go in on itself, which resulted in my sending to a separate school for people who do not know how to survive society. I have now learned from my mistakes, and is now dedicated to helping the world free itself of the shackles of religion which is preventing the human race from advancing itself scientifically. If you would like to contact me please e-mail me at jlockettxo@gmail.com. Thank you and have a nice day. 🙂

In previous generations, it was common for young people to leave the Church in their 20’s and 30’s and come back to the Church in their 40’s and 50’s. This was seen as young people “sowing their wild oats”. The issue today is: They aren’t coming back. They have permanently left Christianity. Why? I believe that the answer is this: the Internet.

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